Network address resolution

ABSTRACT

A content delivery network with at least one first content server bound to a first domain associated with a first characteristic (e.g., popular) associated with content servable from the content delivery network. The content delivery network includes at least one second content server bound to a second domain associated with a second characteristic (e.g., unpopular) associated with content servable from the content delivery network. At least one processing device including computer executable instructions for receiving a request to provide an embedded resource including either a first host name associated with the first domain or a second host name associated with the second domain.

TECHNICAL FIELD

Aspects of the present disclosure relate to network address resolution,and particularly involve the assignment of enhanced domains to content,and the use of those enhanced domains to tie the delivery of the contentto particular content server tiers within a CDN where the domains andassociated tiers are aligned with the popularity of the content.

BACKGROUND

The Internet and the World Wide Web (the “Web”) have become ubiquitous.Content providers (publishers) now use the Internet (and, particularly,the Web) to provide all sorts of content to numerous clients all overthe world. In order to offload the job of serving some or all of theircontent, many content providers now subscribe to content deliverynetworks (CDNs). Using a CDN, content can be served to clients from theCDN (e.g., from one or more servers in the CDN) instead of from thecontent provider's server(s). In a caching CDN, content may also becached on some or all of the CDN servers, either before being served orin response to specific requests for that content. Having content cachedwithin edge servers of the CDN enhances the performance of the CDNbecause the content does not have to be retrieved from mid-tier originservers or other locations, which are less efficient than edge serversin providing content.

Numerous forms of content may be served from the CDN. For example,television shows and movies may now be accessed from any number of Websites, and the shows and movies may actually be served from the CDN.Print newspapers have migrated to the Web and provide portals throughwhich clients operating some form of computing device (e.g., PC, smartphone, or tablet), with a browser may access numerous forms of content,such as short video clips, articles, images, and audio tracks. Softwareupdates and patches, once only provided on disc and mailed torecipients, are now routinely distributed to devices using only networkconnections, and the updates and patches are delivered from a CDN.

It is with these observations in mind, among others, that variousaspects of the present disclosure were conceived and developed.

SUMMARY

Embodiments of the disclosure include a content delivery methodcomprising the operations of receiving a content request at a contentserver bound to a domain, the domain associated with a characteristic ofthe content, the request being associated with a host name associatedwith the characteristic of the content and assigned at an origin of thecontent, and serving the content.

Embodiments further involve an apparatus comprising at least oneprocessor device in communication with a tangible computer readablemedium including computer executable instructions for receiving anassociation of a resource to at least one of a first characteristic or asecond characteristic of the resource. The instructions further includeassigning the resource to a first domain associated with the firstcharacteristic when the resource is indicated as having the firstcharacteristic, the first domain bound with at least one first contentserver of a content delivery network and from which a connection may bemade to obtain the resource. Finally, the instructions may furtherinclude assigning the resource to a second domain associated with thesecond characteristic when the resource is indicated as having thesecond characteristic, the second domain bound with at least one secondcontent server of a content delivery network and from which a connectionmay be made to obtain the resource.

These and other embodiments are discussed in more detail below.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The foregoing and other objects, features, and advantages of the presentdisclosure set forth herein should be apparent from the followingdescription of particular embodiments of those inventive concepts, asillustrated in the accompanying drawings. Also, in the drawings the likereference characters may refer to the same parts throughout thedifferent views. The drawings depict only typical embodiments of thepresent disclosure and, therefore, are not to be considered limiting inscope.

FIG. 1 is a system diagram illustrating a content delivery networkwhereby popularity or some other content characteristic is assigned tothe content at the origin, such as through a designated enhanced hostname bound to a server tier that serves the content;

FIG. 2 is a flow diagram illustrating a method of delivering contentusing an enhanced host name, assigned at the origin, that is associatedwith a characteristic of the content, such as popularity, as assigned atthe origin;

FIG. 3 is a flow diagram illustrating a method of using CNAMES linkedwith popularity domains of the CDN;

FIG. 4 is a system diagram illustrating a content delivery networkwhereby popularity or some other content characteristic is assigned tothe content at the origin, such as through a designated enhanced hostname bound to a plurality of server tiers tied to popularitydesignations and that serve the content; and

FIG. 5 is an example of a computing system that may implement varioussystems and methods discussed herein.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Aspects of the present disclosure involve systems and methods forselecting an edge server, rack, cluster or other device, which may be ina content delivery network (CDN), to serve content to a client. Aspectsof the present disclosure involve delegating popularity assignment of aresource to a customer of the CDN. In one example, the popularitydesignation may take the form of assigning an enhanced host name to aresource at the origin server for the resource. Namely, within theorigin server or in association therewith, a host name for a resourcemay be assigned or otherwise defined based on the popularity of theresource. In one possible implementation, a popular host name and anunpopular host name, or any number of host names linked to popularity,in addition to other characteristics alternatively or additionally topopularity, may be available for assignment to content. So, for example,popular content is assigned to the popular domain whereas unpopularcontent is assigned to the unpopular domain, and appropriate URL's arecreated reflecting such assignments. As discussed herein, the originserver for content is the source for content from any given contentprovider. In many instances, content becomes distributed across manynodes within a network but the original source for that content, andfrom which the content is distributed to such nodes, is the originserver, which may be a collection of origin servers and may bemaintained by a customer or delegated or otherwise maintained by thirdparties, including the CDN provider. Thus, when a customer assigns aresource to a popular or unpopular host name at the origin server, thatassignment may remain associated with the content until altered at theorigin server.

Within the CDN, one or more content server tiers may be arranged toserve both popular and unpopular content, with servers within each tierbound to the popular or unpopular domain. For example, a relativelylarge number of content servers, positioned proximate or otherwisegeographically relative to various possible client locations, may bebound to the popular domain. Popular content requests from a client willbe resolved by the CDN to a server within the popular tier, from whereit will be served. As the content is deemed popular at the origin, thecontent will initially be accessed from a machine within the populartier, and then, depending on the architecture of the CDN, may then becached at that machine.

The term “content” as used herein means any kind of data, in any form,regardless of its representation and regardless of what it represents.The term “content” may include, without limitation, static and/ordynamic images, text, audio content, including streamed audio, videocontent, including streamed video, web pages, computer programs,documents, files, and the like. Some content may be embedded in othercontent, e.g., using markup languages such as HTML and XML. Contentincludes content which is created or formed or composed specifically inresponse to a particular request. The term “resource” is sometimes usedherein to refer to content.

FIG. 1 illustrates one example network configuration for practicingaspects of the present disclosure, while FIGS. 2 and 3 describe methods.The illustrated network would include many other components involved inservicing a request and providing content; however, the diagram herefocuses on only some components involved in the system and one ofordinary skill will readily understand other conventional componentswithin the network. With respect to content delivery, in this example, arequest originates from a computing device 10 operating a browser 12.The computing device may be some form of conventional device such aspersonal computer, a thin client, a tablet, a smart phone, a set-topbox, a cable box, or the like, that is capable of running a browser andproviding a user with the ability to request content over a networkconnection, or some other application suitable for interacting with anetwork and requesting content therefrom. The user device may be aconsumer device deployed in a public network, may be an enterprisedevice deployed in private network or other type of device. The networkconnection, in many instances, will be provided by an Internet serviceprovider (ISP) operating one or more resolvers 14. A resolver (alsoreferred to as a DNS resolver) is a client-side device used to resolve anetwork address (e.g., translate a domain name into an Internet protocol(IP) address) for a requested resource. Generally speaking, the resolvercontacts (e.g., queries) a DNS infrastructure 16, which may involve manydifferent components, to resolve a network address for a resource.

To illustrate aspects of the disclosure, consider when a user enters,into the browser, a web page address http://www.example.com. The browser12 contacts or otherwise interacts with the resolver 14, which in turnrequests the IP address for the www.example.com Web page from DNS 16(operation 200). DNS returns the IP address of an origin server 18capable of delivering a hypertext markup language (HTML) document 20that will render the Web page in the browser. The present flow discussescontacting an origin server for the Web page; however, this is done forexplanation purposes, and it is possible that DNS may resolve therequest to some other device for obtaining the Web page. In order toobtain the HTML document, the client device establishes a TCPconnection, which may encapsulate an HTTP protocol communication, withthe origin server (operation 210). Embodiments discussed herein mayreference HTML documents but such reference should not be consideredrestrictive, and other container objects may also be utilized, such asXML documents. An origin server is a device (or collection of devices)maintaining original copies of content for distribution to client'sand/or distribution of copies to other nodes. While the presentdisclosure is illustrated in association with a connection to an originserver, the connection may instead be made with some other devicedesignated in DNS to serve the requested resource (ER). In this example,the origin server is connected with a database 23, which organizes andmanages stored resources in some form of storage device (or devices),such as a storage appliance, that includes the HTML document with theembedded resource. The HTML document is what the browser uses to displaythe Web page www.example.com. In this example, the embedded resource isa link (e.g., a URL) to some form of content that the user can obtain byselecting the link when the Web page is displayed. In the case of anonline news site, the home page or any number of sub-pages (HTMLdocuments) may include any number of links to content (embeddedresources) such as articles, short video clips, etc. In the case of atelevision or movie portal, the home page or any number of sub-pages,may include any number of links to particular episodes of a televisionseries, specific movie releases, or other content.

When the origin server receives the request (or at some time prior toreceiving the request), the origin server or a device associatedtherewith, such as a popularity service 22, pre-designates the embeddedresource as either popular or non-popular. In this example, a customerof the CDN is presumed to understand the popularity of its content, andthus can assign popularity to the content. Within the origin server,embedded resources—specific instances of content—are designated aspopular or unpopular through the association of that content with apopular or unpopular domain (or any number of domains linked topopularity designations for content). For example, consider the casewhere www.example.com is the home page for an on-line video provider andthe embedded resource is a link to a recently released movie that didwell in theaters. In such an example, when the movie is released by thevideo provider, it may initially be presumed to be quite popular, andthus the content may be assigned to the popular domain. In the sameexample, the customer may preset the popularity to “high,” for example,based on its understanding that the initial release of the video will behighly popular among its subscribers (user base). The scale ofpopularity may be in any number of possible forms. In the examplesdiscussed herein, content is either popular or non-popular. However,popularity may be designated in others scales, such as 1=low, 2=medium,3=high, scale of 1-10 with 1 being unpopular and 10 being the mostpopular, etc. Moreover, the scale may be adjusted from an initialdesignation based on the number of requests for the content, which maybe based on discrete times (e.g., number of requests per day, perminute, per second, etc.). Finally, popularity may also be regionalized.For example, a resource in the case of a news story may initially beconsidered to be popular in the region from which it originates butun-popular in other regions. Say, for example, the case of a breakingnews story in Atlanta, the on-line news story (embedded resource) may bedesignated popular for Georgia or the Southeast of the United States,but may be designated unpopular for all other geographic regions. Thepopularity service 22 may provide a user interface to designatepopularity and attributes thereof, or may be a service thatautomatically designates popularity.

To provide a popularity designation at DNS time, an enhanced host nameis provided for the embedded resource (operation 300), and the enhancedhost name associated resources are returned in the resource requested(operation 220). In one example, the enhanced host name is operablyassociated with a CDN from which the content will be delivered.Moreover, the enhanced host name operably associates the content tophysical content servers of the CDN from which the content will bedelivered. The CDN architecture may reflect the popular versus unpopularcontent by providing more and diverse content delivery sources toprovide the popular content relative to the unpopular content. For somecontent, such as particulalry unpopular content, the returned enhancedhost name may direct the requesting device (e.g., a client) to theorigin server of the content rather than a CDN node.

With respect to the enhanced host names, in one example, if resource 1(e.g., a recently released block buster movie) is considered popular andresource 2 (e.g., a very old esoteric documentary film) is consideredunpopular, then two enhanced host names may be: Embedded resource 1(ER1)=http://popular.example.com/res1 (for the popular content) andEmbedded resource 2 (ER2)=http://unpopular.example.com/res2 (for theunpopular content). Here, the popular URL host name and the unpopularURL host name are embedded within the resources (links) of the HTML pagefrom which a user may request either of the resources. Thus, popularityis being designated at the origin server and thus when the HTML, orother resource, including the embedded resources is returned to therequesting client, any subsequent selection by the client to obtainthose embedded resources presupposes the popularity of those resourcesand ultimately directs the request to either a set of content serversconfigured to deliver popular content or a set of servers configured todeliver unpopular content, within the CDN.

Returning to the client request, the HTML document is returned to theclient with the embedded resources as described above. When the clientthen selects either the popular or unpopular content, the browser againcommunicates with the ISP resolver to look-up (through DNS) the enhancedhost name associated with the resource and connects with the appropriatedomain (operation 230), which domain may be within a CDN. Using thepopular example, the ISP resolver would contact DNS to resolvepopular.example.com. In one specific implementation, DNS would include aCNAME for the popular and unpopular domains, which CNAMES weredistributed to DNS (operation 310). For example, DNS would include, forthe popular content, CNAME=popular.example.cdn.net and for the unpopularcontent, CNAME=unpopular.example.cdn.net. The CNAME's in DNS eitherpoint to the popular or unpopular domain within the CDN. The populardomain is bound to a set of machines 24 to handle the demands of servinghigh volumes of requests that are typically associated with popularcontent, whereas the unpopular domain is bound to a set of machines 26to handle the demands of serving relatively lower volumes of requestsassociated with unpopular content. For example, the popular domain maybe bound to a larger set of machines, which may also be dispersed alongthe edges of the CDN and may be high performance machines, whereas theunpopular domain may be bound to a relatively smaller set of machines,or lower performance machines, which may not be positioned at the edgesof the CDN or as widely distributed across the CDN.

It is possible that the popular set of nodes may be a superset of theunpopular set of nodes, or may be a disjointed set. In such instances,when content transistions from popular to non-popular or non-popular topopular, a transitional time may be configured. Initially, a majority ofresponses will employ a non-enhanced host name and will transition to anenhanced host name to allow new CDN nodes to fill the content prior tohaving to serve the entire population of requestors.

The CNAME causes a DNS look-up to resolve the IP address for the content(operation 320). In one example, CDN name servers 28 will be a part ofthe DNS look-up, and the CDN name servers may use some form ofintelligent traffic management (ITM) (best distributor algorithms) 30 todirect the client to obtain the content from a content server in therelevant domain. More particularly, the CDN name servers and the ITM mayreturn an IP address (or other location) for the best server node withinthe CDN to deliver the content and to provide as a modified embeddedresource (operation 330). For popular content, the node will be withinthe popular tier, for unpopular content, the node will be in theunpopular tier.

The ITM may return an address that is optimally suited to serve thecontent to the requesting client. So, in a simple example, for a user inNew York requesting popular content from a CDN having nodes capable ofserving the content from both California and New York, it may not beoptimal to serve the content from California due to any number ofreasons including cost, latency, quality, optimal CDN use, and the like.In the present system, the ITM may instead return the New York node tothe client in New York. Note, in one example, the CDN name servers mayuse the resolver location as a proxy for the requesting client location.

Besides client information, including geography, and popularity, theorigin server may use other information such as policy information,political information, restrictions, etc., when designating a tier Forexample, the distribution of some content may be geographicallylimited—e.g., obtaining real-time sporting content may be limited in thegeographic area of one or both teams participating in the event. Somecontent may have geopolitical distribution restrictions.

Such information may be provided by selecting amongst a set ofpre-defined enhanced host names, or by embedding such additionalinformation in fields within the host name. For example, enhanced hostnames such as popular-us.example.com or unpopular-global.example.com maybe used to designate popular content in the United States (through the“us” embellishment of the enhanced host) only or globally unpopularcontent (through the “global” embellishment of the enhanced host),respectively. Alternatively, embedded fields may be used such aspop10.us.example.com (for very popular, US only resources) orpop2.us-ca-eu.example.com (for not so popular, but could be served fromUS (“us” designation), Canada (“ca” designation) or Europe (“eu”designation) resources.

The ITM may take into account and use the IP address of the clientdevice (client IP), the IP address of the resolver (resolver IP),customer, and the various other forms of information in determining thenode from which to serve the content. For example, the ITM may usegeographical information to pick the node closest to the client to servethe content. The computing engine may further take into account networktraffic, and if the closest node is too busy, then select another nodethat is close but less busy.

In some instances, for example, the node may not yet have the content,and upon receiving the request, have to request the content from anorigin server, another node, or elsewhere. In such instances, theinstruction would cause the node to cache and retain the content and beable to directly serve the next request.

The CDN name servers 28 return the determined network address to therequesting client device 10, and the browser 12 then may establish aconnection with the CDN node designated to serve the embedded resource.The designated node will either have the embedded resource, or it willobtain the content and serve it to the requesting client. Within theCDN, as client's request content, the popular tier nodes 24 will quicklyhave all of the content cached and be able to deliver the contentdirectly upon receiving a request from a client.

For any customer of the CDN, particularly those with large libraries ofcontent, such content may be sharded or otherwise spread across nodesbased on popularity. For a particularly large content library, a singlerack of content servers may be incapable of storing the content library.In such an instance or for any number of reasons, the content librarymay be subdivided or “sharded” into slices, with the various slices eachstored in distinct racks. To achieve this end, and referring to FIG. 4,within one possible implementation of the current disclosure, the CDNmay have any number of popular and unpopular domains (referred to as afirst domain 40 and a second domain 42 for purposes of example) andthose domains may be bound to racks 44, 46 within the CDN. For instance,a library of 40,000 movies with 10,000 popular movies and 30,000relatively unpopular movies, may be sharded into two 5,000 movie slicesof popular movies, and six 5,000 movie slices of unpopular movies. Insuch a situation, the CDN may provide two popular domains and sixunpopular domains, with machines 24 bound to the popular domain andmachines 26 bound to the unpopular domains to store and serve thecontent. Appropriate CNAMEs may be provided to DNS so that the CDN nameservers

Sticking with the example of popular content, the CDN may provide to acustomer two popular domains to assign to popular content. When definingan embedded resource for a specific popular resource, the customerassigns one of the two popular domains to the content. Referring to FIG.4, if popular resource 1 is assigned to popular domain 1, then a clientrequest for the popular resource 1 will return an address for a contentmachine bound to the popular 1 domain. More particularly, the initialrequest, by way of the CNAME, will cause a query to the CDN name servers28 and any associated best distributor (e.g., ITM) infrastructure 30.The resolved request, will return information to contact the appropriatedomain (e.g., domains 40 and 42) and associated tiers (e.g., tiers 44and 46).

FIG. 5 is an example schematic diagram of a computing system 600 thatmay implement various methodologies discussed herein. The computingsystem for the application 608 includes a bus 601 (i.e., interconnect),at least one processor 602 or other compute element, at least onecommunication port 603, a main memory 604, a removable storage media605, a read-only memory 606, and a mass storage device 607. Processor(s)602 can be any known processor, such as, but not limited to, an Intel®Itanium® or Itanium 2® processor(s), AMD® Opteron® or Athlon MP®processor(s), or Motorola® lines of processors. Communication port 603can be any of an RS-232 port for use with a modem based dial-upconnection, a 10/100 Ethernet port, a Gigabit port using copper orfiber, or a USB port. Communication port(s) 603 may be chosen dependingon a network such as a Local Area Network (LAN), a Wide Area Network(WAN), or any network to which the computer system 600 connects. Therendezvous application may be in communication with peripheral devices(e.g., display screen 630, input device 616 via Input/Output (I/O) port609.

Main memory 604 can be Random Access Memory (RAM) or any other dynamicstorage device(s) commonly known in the art. Read-only memory 606 can beany static storage device(s) such as Programmable Read-Only Memory(PROM) chips for storing static information such as instructions forprocessor 602. Mass storage device 607 can be used to store informationand instructions. For example, hard disks such as the Adaptec® family ofSmall Computer Serial Interface (SCSI) drives, an optical disc, an arrayof disks such as Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID), such asthe Adaptec® family of RAID drives, or any other mass storage devices,may be used.

Bus 601 communicatively couples processor(s) 602 with the other memory,storage and communications blocks. Bus 601 can be a PCI/PCI-X, SCSI, orUniversal Serial Bus (USB) based system bus (or other) depending on thestorage devices used. Removable storage media 605 can be any kind ofexternal hard drives, thumb drives, Compact Disc-Read Only Memory(CD-ROM), Compact Disc-Re-Writable (CD-RW), Digital Video Disk-Read OnlyMemory (DVD-ROM), etc.

Embodiments herein may be provided as a computer program product, whichmay include a machine-readable medium having stored thereon instructionswhich may be used to program a computer (or other electronic devices) toperform a process. The machine-readable medium may include, but is notlimited to, optical discs, CD-ROMs, magneto-optical disks, ROMs, RAMs,erasable programmable read-only memories (EPROMs), electrically erasableprogrammable read-only memories (EEPROMs), magnetic or optical cards,flash memory, or other type of media/machine-readable medium suitablefor storing electronic instructions. Moreover, embodiments herein mayalso be downloaded as a computer program product, wherein the programmay be transferred from a remote computer to a requesting computer byway of data signals embodied in a carrier wave or other propagationmedium via a communication link (e.g., modem or network connection).

As shown, main memory 604 may be encoded with a popularity application608 that perform a popularity service 650-1 at the processor (orprocessors), relating to the provision of an enhanced embedded resourceusing designated domains (e.g., popular or unpopular) related to CDNcontent deliver tiers, a rendezvous application or service, or othervarious methodologies as discussed herein. For example, in oneembodiment, the popularity application 650-1 may include or otherwiseimplement the various processes and/or instructions described herein.The application 650-1 (and/or other resources as described herein) canbe embodied as software code such as data and/or logic instructions(e.g., code stored in the memory or on another computer readable mediumsuch as a disk) that supports processing functionality according todifferent embodiments described herein. During operation of oneembodiment, processor(s) 602 accesses main memory 604 via the use of bus601 in order to launch, run, execute, interpret or otherwise perform thelogic instructions of the 650-1.

The description above includes example systems, methods, techniques,instruction sequences, and/or computer program products that embodytechniques of the present disclosure. However, it is understood that thedescribed disclosure may be practiced without these specific details. Inthe present disclosure, the methods disclosed may be implemented as setsof instructions or software readable by a device. Further, it isunderstood that the specific order or hierarchy of steps in the methodsdisclosed are instances of example approaches. Based upon designpreferences, it is understood that the specific order or hierarchy ofsteps in the method can be rearranged while remaining within thedisclosed subject matter. The accompanying method claims presentelements of the various steps in a sample order, and are not necessarilymeant to be limited to the specific order or hierarchy presented.

The described disclosure may be provided as a computer program product,or software, that may include a machine-readable medium having storedthereon instructions, which may be used to program a computer system (orother electronic devices) to perform a process according to the presentdisclosure. A machine-readable medium includes any mechanism for storinginformation in a form (e.g., software, processing application) readableby a machine (e.g., a computer). The machine-readable medium mayinclude, but is not limited to, magnetic storage medium, optical storagemedium (e.g., CD-ROM); magneto-optical storage medium, read only memory(ROM); random access memory (RAM); erasable programmable memory (e.g.,EPROM and EEPROM); flash memory; or other types of medium suitable forstoring electronic instructions.

It is believed that the present disclosure and many of its attendantadvantages should be understood by the foregoing description, and itshould be apparent that various changes may be made in the form,construction and arrangement of the components without departing fromthe disclosed subject matter or without sacrificing all of its materialadvantages. The form described is merely explanatory, and it is theintention of the following claims to encompass and include such changes.

While the present disclosure has been described with reference tovarious embodiments, it should be understood that these embodiments areillustrative and that the scope of the disclosure is not limited tothem. Many variations, modifications, additions, and improvements arepossible. More generally, embodiments in accordance with the presentdisclosure have been described in the context of particularimplementations. Functionality may be separated or combined in blocksdifferently in various embodiments of the disclosure or described withdifferent terminology. These and other variations, modifications,additions, and improvements may fall within the scope of the disclosureas defined in the claims that follow.

What is claimed is:
 1. A content delivery method comprising: receiving acontent request for content at a content server bound to a domain, thedomain associated with a characteristic of the content, the contentrequest being associated with a host name associated with thecharacteristic of the content and assigned at an origin of the content;and serving the content.
 2. The method of claim 1 wherein thecharacteristic relates to popularity of the content.
 3. The method ofclaim 2 wherein the characteristic is at least one of popular andunpopular, the domain being at least one of a popular domain associatedwith content having the popular characteristic and an unpopular domainassociated with content having the unpopular characteristic
 4. Themethod of claim 1 wherein the host name is an enhanced host name with afield associated with the characteristic of the content.
 5. The methodof claim 4 wherein the enhanced host name is provided as an embeddedresource.
 6. The method of claim 4 wherein the host name has a form ofcharacteristic.host.topleveldomain.
 7. A content delivery networkcomprising: at least one first content server bound to a first domainassociated with a first characteristic associated with content servablefrom the content delivery network; at least one second content serverbound to a second domain associated with a second characteristicassociated with content servable from the content delivery network; andat least one processing device including computer executableinstructions for receiving a request to provide an embedded resourceincluding either a first host name associated with the first domain or asecond host name associated with the second domain.
 8. The contentdelivery network of claim 7 wherein the first characteristic relates toa first popularity level of content and wherein the secondcharacteristic relates a second popularity level of content, the firstpopularity level different from the second popularity level.
 9. Thecontent delivery network of claim 8, the computer executableinstructions further for: receiving an indication of whether a contentassociated with the embedded resource is of the first popularity levelor the second popularity level, and providing the first host name if thecontent is associated with the first popularity level or providing thesecond host name if the content is associated with the second popularitylevel.
 10. The content delivery network of claim 7 whereby the embeddedresource is included in an HTML document and whereby selection of theembedded resource causes a request to either the at least one firstcontent server or the at least one second content server depending onwhether the first host name or the second host name was provided,respectively.
 11. The content delivery network of claim 10 wherein therequest to either the at least one first content server or the at leastone second content server is by way of a first CNAME to the first domainor a second CNAME to the second domain.
 12. The content delivery networkof claim 7 further comprising at least one additional content serverbound to at least one additional domain associated with at least oneadditional characteristic.
 13. The apparatus of claim 7 wherein thecontent delivery network includes at least one additional domainassociated with the first characteristic and at least one additionaldomain associated with the second characteristic.
 14. An apparatuscomprising: at least one processor device in communication with atangible computer readable medium including computer executableinstructions for: receiving an association of a resource to at least oneof a first characteristic or a second characteristic of the resource;assigning the resource to a first domain associated with the firstcharacteristic when the resource is indicated as having the firstcharacteristic, the first domain bound with at least one first contentserver of a content delivery network and from which a connection may bemade to obtain the resource; and assigning the resource to a seconddomain associated with the second characteristic when the resource isindicated as having the second characteristic, the second domain boundwith at least one second content server of a content delivery networkand from which a connection may be made to obtain the resource.
 15. Theapparatus of claim 14 wherein the first characteristic relates to afirst popularity level of the resource and wherein the secondcharacteristic relates a second popularity level of the resource, thefirst popularity level different from the second popularity level. 16.The apparatus of claim 15, the computer executable instructions furtherfor defining an embedded resource to include in an HTML document, theembedded resource referencing the first domain and whereby selection ofthe embedded resource causes a request to the at least one first contentserver or the embedded resource referencing the second domain andwhereby selection of the embedded resource cases a request to the atleast one second content server.
 17. The apparatus of claim 16 whereinthe computer executable instructions generate a first CNAME referencingthe first domain and a second CAME referencing the second domain. 18.The apparatus of claim 15 wherein the content delivery network includesat least one additional domain associated with at least one additionalcharacteristic.
 19. The apparatus of claim 15 wherein the contentdelivery network includes at least one additional domain associated withthe first characteristic and at least one additional domain associatedwith the second characteristic.